So, much like many other builders who have not quite gotten their Sling kit yet, we’ve been keeping ourselves busy with hands-on projects. We went ahead and tried mounting Peter’s ski Marker Griffon bindings on his new skis (the ski shop guys wanted 50$ for it and we were like “nah we’re badass builders now thanks”). This was done largely on a whim starting on a random Tuesday evening.

Time: 4 hours for two people

It took two evenings of after-work work :) We first did everything according to the instructions in https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9XWwP45OfAw. However, we quickly ran into a snag: we had forgotten to print the template at work, since we don’t have a printer. “Utter catastrophe” comes close to describing how I felt about this project at the time.

Peter, however, preservered on, and had another “badass builder moment” where he suggested we make our own template out of cardboard. I agreed, we measured the relevant distances between the boot and binding, found the center line on the skis, and eagerly started drilling.

Soon after, at around 10:30 pm on a workday, we realized that we’d messed up the distance between the front binding and back binding, so that the ski boot did not properly fit into the ski :)

This bodes very well for our airplane building career, I think.

We decided to call it a night so that we didn’t quite set off the “hopeless sleepless addict” alarm at work the next day.

We also realized, as part of the process, that we had been using some truly terrible 5 minute cure epoxy to fill in the wood holes, which we replaced with waterproof marine epoxy (https://www.amazon.com/Loctite-1919324-0-85-Fluid-Syringe-1405604/dp/B00KH62K50) after we’d done some research as to the proper way of filling in the holes. One of the issues with the 5 minute cure epoxy was that it would cure before we had a chance to fill in the holes, so it was kind of sad going where I would mix the epoxy after Peter quickly drilled the hole. I felt a bit like a witch brewing her potion.

Aaanyway, after we’d realized that the holes were in the wrong place, we had had enough experience to redrill them in the correct place, fill in the screws, and make one very happy Peter!

So, we eventually successfully put in the bindings (albeit with the center of the boot being like a centimeter off forward of the center of the ski), felt reasonably decent about our building skills, and will keep you guys updated on the other marginally-airplane related building things in our lives :)

How about you guys? Ever had a time when you tried to be a badass builder and achieved mixed or excellent results? Eager to hear about in comments below!